She’s held this pose for over a week, my lovely tulip. Just like me, no one ever told her she wasn’t a dancer, and most likely (just like me) she wouldn’t have believed them if they had. And who could blame her? Donned in that lovely yellow. Gathered in and matched by the strength of the sun. How could she not keep reaching, moving, believing in all things morning as she opened each day. She did feel it! With each rising. From her very stem. And so she would dance.
A writer writes. A painter paints. A baker bakes. Not because someone pays them. Tells them that’s what they are. We decide. For ourselves. The same is true for happy. For love. You get to decide. You get to feel what you feel. No restrictions or limits. If the yellow calls to you, wakes you with a joy that not only can be, but must be, released back to the blue of the sky, then, dance, I say, simply, joyfully, rise up and dance.
Happy Easter! There’s nothing here we can’t rise above.
I didn’t ask them who they voted for, where they came from, or if they went to church on this Sunday morning. Because weren’t we all actually in one, a church, as we hiked the trails of the Catalina State Park? Right down to the organ pipes of the Saguaro cactus.
They wanted me to take a picture of their group, with the mountain and the cactus, and their accomplishment of the hike. We only knew each other because we shared the same dusty earth. And wasn’t that enough? Enough for them to easily hand over their phones to me, a stranger, yet at the end of the same path. We smiled under the same brilliant sun, perhaps all wishing it could always be this way, and we walked with a bit of the prayer still clinging to our shoes.
I played no music on this hike. I listened only to the sounds of my feet in the gravel. It could have been on VanDyke Road, or in Aix en provence. I smiled. The warmth of their phones still clinging to my palms, and the words of John Lennon ringing in my head, “…I am not the only one…”.
